As the sky begins to darken, Jupiter appears low in the southeast. In fact, it may be the first 'star' you see tonight. Look high in the west for Saturn, a bright butterscotch-colored point of light near the constellation Gemini the Twins. Both Jupiter and Saturn make good binocular and telescopic targets.
If you watch the sky low in the northwest just after sunset, you might catch a glimpse of the bright planet Venus this month. Each evening Venus appears a little bit higher, but even by the end of the month, it never sets later than an hour and a half after the Sun.
Red planet Mars still lurks in the pre-dawn hours, low in the southeast. It's not at all impressive now, but will put on a great show later this year.
To celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Space Telescope Science Institute released a pair of extremely high-resolution images on April 25. These pictures are two of the most detailed astronomical images ever taken. One is of the Whirlpool Galaxy (also known as M-51) and the other is a portion of the Eagle Nebula (M-16). As part of the celebration we at the Adventure Science Center received two huge prints of these photographs, which are now on permanent display. If you haven't yet seen them, please stop by and have a look!
Aside from just being pretty pictures, these two images tell the story of star formation, both on a grand scale and in much closer detail.
The Whirlpool Galaxy is a spiral galaxy, much like our own Milky Way Galaxy. The Whirlpool, however, is in just the beginning stages of a collision with another, smaller elliptical galaxy.
If you look closely at the Whirlpool image, you can see different regions within the arms that reveal waves of star formation rippling through the galaxy. The insides of the arms are composed of dark clouds of gas. Compression waves collapse those dark clouds into star forming regions - clouds of bright red gas surrounding newly formed stars. On the outside of the arms you see the clusters of young, hot blue stars that have blown away the remaining gas.
Meanwhile, in the Eagle Nebula, we see a closer-up view of star formation. Back in 1995, the Hubble team released a close-up image of M-16, famously known as the "Pillars of Creation." This new image is from a different part of the same nebula. It shows a pillar of cold gas and dust 9.5 light-years long. The shape of the pillar is the result of nearby stars pushing away gas and dust. Meanwhile, pressure from these stars can create dense gas clouds causing new stars to form.
To find out more about these and other images from HST, visit http://hubblesite.org.
The fireworks this July will be out of this world - when NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has an Independence Day encounter with Comet Tempel 1. The Deep Impact spacecraft is comprised of two parts, the "flyby" spacecraft and an 820-pound (370-kg) "smart impactor" which will be released into the path of Comet Tempel 1. When the comet slams into the impactor, the resulting crater should be somewhere between the size of a house and a football stadium, and could be up to fourteen stories deep. The "flyby" craft will observe and record the impact and ejected material from a safe distance of 300 miles (500 km) while watching for any changes in the comet's activity. For the first time the interior structure and secrets of a comet will be revealed.
Comets are leftover material from the coldest regions of our solar system. Astronomers believe that a comet's interior contains pristine material that may provide insight into the formation of our solar system.
Also watching the impact and its aftermath will be professional and amateur astronomers operating large and small telescopes from many locations on Earth and in space. The resulting data will be analyzed, combined and broadcast over the internet.
On Thursday evening, May 19, starting at 7:30 pm at the Adventure Science Center, Elizabeth M. Warner will present a program on the Deep Impact mission at the regular meeting of the Barnard-Seyfert Astronomical Society. Ms. Warner is a Faculty Research Associate and Director of the Observatory at the University of Maryland. She also serves as liaison between the Deep Impact mission and amateur astronomers and is webmaster for the Amateur Observer Program website for Deep Impact.
BSAS programs are free and open to the public. So join us and learn about comets, the Deep Impact mission, and the role that amateur astronomers have had and will have in this exciting scientific endeavor.
We'd like to thank everyone who helped make our annual Astronomy Day celebration a success. We couldn't do it without you!
Astronomy Magazine/Kalmbach Publishing
Barnard-Seyfert Astronomical Society
International Dark Sky Association
JPL Solar System Ambassadors
Meade Telescopes
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
Austin Peay State University Astronomy
Sky & Telescope Magazine/Sky Publishing
Space Telescope Science Institute
Warner Park Nature Center
